“The Principles of Good Practice: Self-Respect” Comments, Page 1

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5 Comments on “The Principles of Good Practice: Self-Respect”

  1. A tricky aspect of this is the manner of practise I think.

    How many clients in a case load? And how quickly can this number be altered? What provision for varying the length of a session and so on.

    I’d be interested if your course dealt with these kinds of questions or whether it was all just treated individualistically.

  2. I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Evan. If you work in private practice, you can sort these things out to an optimum level, if you work for organisations, you have to do your best as an individual within that framework, working from the ethical principles, and if becomes hard to adhere to them in these circumstances, then some kind of activism might be necessary, also naturally arising out of the ethical principles… I’m not seeing a conflict.

  3. I think one of the great values of the BACP ethical framework (and I’m sure this applies to similar guidelines issued by other professional bodies too) is that whether you work in private practice (as I do now) or for an organisation (which I have done in the past), it gives you an over-arching, independent and protective set of principles to which you can refer and, if necessary, fall back on whenever you run into a potentially sticky situation. It doesn’t have the full force of the law, obviously, but I find it very reassuring just knowing it’s there.
    Working in private practice, I enjoy the flexibility of working in different ways with clients (fortnightly, short-term, long-term, 30 minute sessions instead of 50, on skype as well as face to face etc), and can refer to the guidelines (and my supervisor) if in doubt. In an organisation, if there was ever something questionable about the agency’s way of working (though this was not the case where I used to work), then having the framework to refer to as back-up was invaluable.
    Evan, my course encouraged us to develop as individual practitioners with our own styles of counselling within the integrative 5-relationship model. Evaluation put a lot of emphasis on finding our ‘own way’ of being counsellors. While we didn’t have formal advice on what makes a client load etc, we were encouraged to evaluate these sorts of questions for ourselves and — when qualified and practising — to consult more experienced colleagues and our supervisors for guidance. It was a great course, very empowering.

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